In addition to Sidorivich (the trader and main contact in the first zone) there are trader contacts in several zones, but none in Garbage (the second zone). Traders have unlimited funds to buy your loot.

However any NPC can trade with you. Non trader NPCs just have limited cash and items to trade. If you are wandering around the Garbage zone with full inventory talk to any non-hostile NPC and click the trade button.

I'm a long long time PC gamer and I've haven't found much to like in console games since my Super Nintendo. However Wii caught my attention as something different. The Wii is great for social gaming with friends who are not serious game players. Many of the games are approachable and the Wii remote is a fun and easily learned interface.

I rarely play Wii without friends though. If I'm gonna play something one-player I'd rather have the depth, challenge, graphics, and sound of a PC game. My guess is you'll find the same with a PS3 and a Wii. Look for fun multiplayer games on the Wii that take good advantage of the remote. Play anything else on your PS3.

I ordered mine off of Amazon. And I can't say I'm thrilled with it.

There is some good to it. It's nice and solid build. It fits a remote with the Nyco rechargable battery cover on it. It looks good and its a good size for my grown up hands.

Downsides: The one handed grip is not as steady as the zapper, for games that need precision the zapper works better. Bigger issue is that the trigger has a huge dead zone. The B button does not get activated until the PerfectShot trigger is all the way at the back of its range of motion. To use it effectively you have to keep the trigger half pressed the entire time so you can fire promptly. It's tiring and eventually reduces your accuracy.

If you have a friend with it, I'd highly recommend trying before you buy.

I'm running 32bit XP. Don't see any reason to rush off to a 64bit OS which has occasional game issues.

what about support to 8GB RAM?

Mystery_Writer

I looked at this when I built my last machine a couple months ago. I couldn't find any benchmarks that show performance gain in an existing game going from 2GB to 4GB RAM. Going beyond 4GB at this point seems pointless for gaming. If I was running a database server I'd find a 64bit OS. Right now, I'm playing games.

In the future? Yes.

In the near future? I would imagine not.

mfsa

I think you've hit the nail on the head.

Orange Box thing is a marketing or packaging decision. A DVD-ROM can hold around 4.5 GB and Valve lists the total hard disk requirement for the OB at 1.8 GB. I haven't seen any single game come on multiple DVDs yet.

The fact that games are still shipping on multiple CDs shows how conservative publishers are about moving to the next newest format.

Anyhow this application addresses a different scenerio at all. Lets say you have a Q6600. You start 2 instances of some DVD-to-AVI conversion program for converting two 1-hour video DVDs into AVIs. At the same time you run crysis (which is said to use multi cores). You can try it practically and you will see that crysis won't run that smooth and at the same time the FPS gained in the resulted video conversion would be jerky.

In such scenerio, this application really helps. Try it.

zaigham

This falls pretty squarely in the anecdotal, one-off, test scenario category. That said, you kick ass that you built a tool that allowed you to handle a crazy test case like that and that you put it out there for the world. You deserve acknowledgement and a pat on the back. Kudos.

People keep assuming that console game sales have some strong impact on PC games sales, that's just flawed logic. It's like saying kumquats are doooomed because orange sales are so much higher. It doesn't matter how high orange (console) sales are. There will always be a market for kumquats (PC games), admittedly a smaller one, so there will always be people who sell them.

Here's a better analogy since PC gaming is more for technically proficient hobbiests. Console gaming is to beer as PC gaming is home brew kits. If you just want to enjoy the finished product without having to work at it or know anything, buy beer. If you want to have some control over it, be part of the creation, have the opportunity for a far better experience, but are willing to risk disappointing results, you may be a home brewer... uh PC gamer. Damn what was I talking about?

It's very cool that you can write a program like this. It's great that you share it with the world. As a programming exercise this is great. As a utility for our inner geek to fiddle with low level OS and hardware decision making it's very fun.

[releases the cynic] As an actual tool to improve performance, this is unlikely to help. The OS and the built in logic in the CPU are far more likely to make good decisions about where a process should run. The people who wrote that logic had much more knowledge about the inner workings of their systems than Joe-user like us. I believe you can find anecdotal incidents of bad process -> core choices and performance bumps. But on average, if you compare performance over time between systems where a defined and tested logic system assigns processes and systems where a relatively uninformed humans makes those decisions the software will win. This is especially true in gaming where the most processor hungry games are (slowly but surely) implementing their own logic to utilize multiple cores. [/cynic back in the box]

Despite the game's age, there are tons of WoW players that are new (or at least act like it). You won't be the only one stumbling around and if you have some gaming experience and an interest in reading or poking around you can be more knowledgable than most players in no time.

The races are all pretty balanced. You may have a tiny edge picking the "right" race for a given class in the first couple levels, but once you level a bit and get decent gear the racial differences mean almost nothing. Pick the one you like.

If you're doing your first character and gonna be solo'ing a lot while you figure the game out, Hunter is hands down the most effective class. Once your ready to seriously start playing with other people though, it's more fun and more effective to run a specialist class like a Warrior, Priest, Mage, or Rogue.

And the one tip that I wish someone had told me when I first started on Wow: If you're gonna pick up one UI Mod get Auctioneer. Its a mod that helps you monitor auction house prices so you can find deals and (more importantly) sell the loot you get for good prices. It's a big help for money management on that painful first character.